When it happened, it was not a wave as the exit polls were predicting but a tsunami. With 54.3 vote share, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) resoundingly won the Delhi state elections, garnering 67 of 70 seats. The BJP was reduced to a mere three seats, although its vote share dipped by only 1 percent.
This is a remarkable win for a party that was comprehensively rejected in the May 2014 parliamentary elections and that had forfeited much of its credibility after it failed to govern Delhi, deciding instead to shun responsibility after a mere 49 days in office.
That Delhi voters are ready to give the AAP another chance in February 2015 is testament to the hard work that the AAP's members have done in the last few months to reinstate confidence in their party's ability to deliver on its key commitments. The AAP had emerged out of the peculiar circumstances of the anti-corruption movement in Delhi, so the capital city was always the test case of the workability of the idea of a nonestablishment party.